RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii

by Taylor, Theodora

  “I’ll try,” I promise, thinking of Rashid.

  How would he respond if I called him and told him the truth? Everything that had been going on in the background of our fledgling relationship? That I’d only left the way I did to keep him safe? Would he forgive me the way I hadn’t been able to forgive myself since that horrible Christmas Eve? Would he even take my call?

  “Okay, enough of this emotional stuff,” Jazz says, resetting the conversation from guilt and regrets. “You’re probably right about it being Paco or Wade. If it quacks like a duck and all of that. And I’m sorry for getting Han involved. I just couldn’t take any more calls from Albie.”

  I let out another laugh, this one not so tear-logged. “He’s been calling you?”

  “Yeah, he has.” Jazz launches into her Connecticut Albie impression. “Everybody says that autumns in New England are so pretty, but did you know Connecticut falls are the worst? The leaves change all these colors that hurt your eyes. And everything dies, but people are, like, yay, it’s so pretty here!”

  “In Hawaii, nothing ever dies,” I add, also doing my best Albie impression. “Plus you can climb the palm trees, and they’ve got coconuts up there!”

  “That’s exactly what he said! Were you recording the call?” Jazz asks.

  I laugh with her and somehow feel better after we hang up. Even though, there’s now a new question surrounding those creepy messages I used to get.

  I don’t want Jazz anywhere near this, but if she’s insisting, then she needs to tell her criminal to look into the Lacerda brothers’ associates. Maybe they paid someone in the IT department to hook up dummy numbers to burner phones. It’s Paco or Wade Lacerda behind those messages. It has to be.

  I pull out of the parking lot and make a mental note to call Jazz with that theory as soon as I get home.

  I’ll call her and….I’ll call Rashid.

  All of this. He’s doing it for you.

  It was time…it was time to tell him the truth. It doesn’t matter if he hangs up on me. He deserves to know why I really left after the best six weeks of my life.

  For the first time in years, a decision I’ve made feels absolutely right in my chest. But I never get a chance to make that call.

  I’m wrong about it being Paco or Wade behind those horrible messages and threats. And I find that out the hard way before I get back to the Calson estate.

  29

  RASHID

  The time for delusion is over. In the months that follow Mika’s departure, there are only three things in my life: work, Torture, and whiskey.

  At one point in October Faizan tries to intervene. “You have been in here since three this morning and you only manage a couple of hours of sleep after drinking copious amounts of alcohol. I am worried about you, and so is Sheikh Zahir,” he says when he brings my lunch tray to my lab instead of Waseela. “Perhaps you should call him as you were doing before. Assure him there is no need for another…ah…visit.”

  “Faizan,” I say without looking up from the computer.

  “Yes, Your Excellency?”

  “Send Mr. Al Shafar a request for a new employment contract.”

  “Are you sure about that, Your Excellency?” I can hear the concerned frown in his voice, though I continue to work at my computer. “I am not at all certain Mika would—”

  “It’s not for Mika, it’s for you,” I answer, cutting him off. “Let Mr. Al Shafar know this one should contain an NDA with the most severe repercussions if you discuss me or how I live my life with anyone. Including my cousin.”

  There’s a long pause, into which I say, “I would like that new employment contract right away.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” Faizan says after another long moment.

  And that’s the last opinion I hear from Faizan.

  It’s back as it used to be between us before those delusional months when I thought I was making myself worthy for Mika…a woman who left me with a word written across a post-it. I am the boss and he is the servant. Not my advisor or my confessor.

  Good.

  Unfortunately, Torture isn’t nearly as compliant as my long-time attendant.

  “Okay, that’s it, you’re going to have to find someone else to work with on this project,” he tells me the weekend before Thanksgiving.

  We’re doing the monthly unit stress and integrity test, or as a layperson might call it, boxing to see how well one can balance on the Future Legs and how they recover when I take a punch.

  I assume Torture does not appreciate that I’ve yet to take a punch in our last two sessions or that I’ve gotten in three body shots today.

  “Again,” I say, ignoring his pique. “The session isn’t done.”

  “It is for me.” He starts ripping off his gloves. “Look, man, I’m a big guy. I don’t mind taking a punch or two but this isn’t research anymore. The way you’re coming at me, it feels like you want to make me mad. Want me to beat you, like you’re…”

  He trails off.

  “Like I’m what. Not already broken?” I ask, my tone scathing. Does he think I’m not worthy to fight because I’m not whole like him? I eye his wedding band, jealously. With a woman who would happily agree to stay with me and have my children?

  “Like you want to feel on the outside like you feel on the inside,” he finishes instead. “And I get it, man. Breakups are hard. In my line of work, I’ve seen more than my share. Patients with an SCI getting left by their spouses after being married for decades even. But the cure for people who get left after decades is the same as the cure for people who get left after a few months.”

  Not months, I think bitterly. Not even a full six weeks. But I can’t stop thinking about her. Craving her. Wanting that future I envisioned when I confronted her that last night.

  “What is this cure, then?” I ask Torture, feeling desperate for anything that will salve this heartbreak.

  “It’s time, man.” Torture answers with a shake of his head. “Just time.”

  Just time…

  I don’t believe him. Time is my enemy. A desolate maw with which I have nothing to fill now that I’ve lost the delusion that I could actually win Mika…make a life with her. I shake my head. “I don’t think time will work for me.”

  Torture folds his arms and gives me a considering look, his normally hard face softening as he says, “If it’s hurting this much, have you considered calling her? Just for closure? It’s the least she could do.”

  Have I considered calling her? Only a hundred times. But I tell my unexpected advisor as I’ve told myself. “She has made it clear that she doesn’t want to be with me, and I am trying not to be, as you Americans would say, ‘psycho’ about it. If I heard her voice, I’m not sure I could stay away. No matter what excuse she gave for this closure of y—”

  “Jazz, come back here! You can’t go in there!”

  “Outta the way, Vampire Manservant. I’m talking to your boss!”

  Torture and I both turn to the sound of Faizan and Mika’s sister arguing in the hallway. And I lower my gloves when the woman I’ve never seen outside of board shorts and ponytails, suddenly bursts in, wearing a cocktail dress and heels.

  “I am sorry, Your Excellency, she slipped by me before I knew her intent,” Faizan says, coming up behind her.

  He grabs her arm, but she rips it away.

  “No, I need to talk to you. Please, it’s about Mika!” Jazz tells me, eyes desperate. “She didn’t want to tell you why she really left, but now she’s been kidnapped and I think you might be the only one I know with enough resources to get her back!”

  Mika…she’s in danger.

  I instantly hold up my hand to stop Faizan from dragging Jazz away. “Who took her?” I demand.

  Jazz shakes her head at me, her face a rictus of panic and worry. “That’s the crazy thing. It was…”

  STONE

  I’m startled awake when my phone starts ringing in the middle of the night.

  The love of my fuck
ing life murmurs something in the dark.

  “It’s me,” I tell her, sitting up in bed, and pulling open the nightstand where I keep my phone. Not the iPhone I use for Naima and all the other legitimate people in my life, but the Samsung burner. This device’s got a number I only gave out to Luca and my closest friends in case of brutal emergency. Friends like Keane and Rashid.

  “What?” I answer with a surly growl, expecting it to probably be Luca but possibly Keane.

  I nearly fall off the bed when Rashid’s voice rushes back at me. He sounds like he’s about to have a heart attack.

  “Rashid, calm down, I can’t understand you. Talk slower…”

  He does, and the story he tells ain’t for the faint of heart. Especially if you’re selectively sympathetic like me and know how it feels to love somebody to fucking death and find out their life’s in danger. “Okay, send me everything you’ve got. We’ll fix this. I swear on my life.”

  My wife’s sitting all the way up in bed by the time I hang up. “Rashid? Isn’t that the friend who hasn’t returned any of your calls or texts since he lost his wife and daughter?” she asks.

  “Yeah, the freeze out’s over,” I tell her, getting out of bed and pulling on some pants, even though I was supposed to take the week of Thanksgiving off. “He’s got a new woman now, and she’s in danger. So he needs my help.”

  30

  MIKA

  “Thanks for making my favorite for breakfast again. I really appreciate it.”

  I don’t answer, just sullenly push at the edges of the Portuguese tortilla I’m cooking in the cast iron frying pan. I would never volunteer to make the man at the cabin’s small wooden table breakfast. Not in a million years. But I’m handcuffed to the stove. Literally.

  “The usual response is ‘you’re welcome.’”

  I don’t answer.

  “You’re welcome,” the voice has become menacing behind me.

  I clamp my lips and keep pushing tortilla edges.

  But then I hear the sound of him pulling the slide back on his gun to chamber a round. “Say you’re welcome, whore.”

  Fear ripples down my back, slimy as a snake. Would he seriously shoot me over not giving him a polite response? Leave Albie without a mother?

  “You’re welcome,” I say quickly, erring on the side of staying alive, just as I had been ever since he popped up in the back seat of my car the day before last.

  “Look at me when you say it.”

  My stomach twists with fear and stars encroach at the edge of my vision, telling me I’m too weak to do that. This is the fourth one-handed meal I’ve made him since he brought me to this cabin, but so far he hasn’t allowed me to eat.

  But as usual, when I feel despair closing in, I look for something to be grateful for. Thankfully, he hasn’t forced me to have sex. Just cook and sit in a chair and watch him as he read his Bible. Also I’m still alive, and I wasn’t sure how long that would last when I found myself trapped in a car with him after my grocery store run.

  Despite my hunger and my fear, I find the strength to turn and say, “You’re welcome” to my dead husband.

  Only he’s not dead.

  Alberto is sitting at the table of the fully stocked cabin he brought me to after a three-hour drive from Connecticut to a collection of mountains just past the Vermont state line. He has one hand on top of a closed Bible and a holier than thou look on his face. His dark hair has gray in it now, and he wears glasses that make his eyes seem to gleam with what could be mistaken for intelligence, instead of madness.

  Apparently, he’s been doing IT work during the years that he’s been kept in the witness protection program while the FBI built their case against the Chinese triad responsible for trafficking those girls. But dressed in khakis and a long-sleeved shirt, buttoned up all the way to the top, he could have easily been mistaken for a preacher.

  If not for the large Desert Eagle gun in his other hand.

  “Why are you looking so glum?” he asks over the loaded weapon. “I figured this was what you wanted after seeing how you let that sand rat hold you down and fuck you after he chased you up the stairs.

  This isn’t the first time he’s brought up something that happened in Hawaii. Apparently, he’d been watching the house all summer, ever since the surveillance camera he’d had one of his brothers plant on the carport gate the previous June had caught “something not right.”

  It had been that day I’d put on clothes to go to the grocery store and Rashid had chased me into the yard. The camera hadn’t caught the part where my clothes were ripped off, but it had captured just enough to make Alberto suspicious enough to book a ticket to Hawaii using his post-death identity. Then he’d spent the next few weeks surveilling the house himself from afar.

  He’d told me the story yesterday with him cast as the hero. The husband who’d been forced to take a deal with the feds and fake his own death because of his unfaithful wife, finally catching her in the act.

  “Being forced to fuck? Isn’t that what gets you off these days, whore?” he asks now.

  Anger begins to simmer underneath my fear. I hate that he saw that. Not because it was wrong, but because it feels like he’s violated something that was sacred. My perfect almost six weeks with Rashid is now tainted by his vitriol and hate.

  And it’s not like Alberto really wants to understand what gets me off. Ever since he popped up in the back seat of my car and made me drive to this cabin, he’s been asking me questions about my time with Rashid. But he keeps asking them in his usual way. Like he already knows all the answers, no matter what I say.

  How had I forgotten this aspect of his personality? He’d complimented me for being a nice Catholic girl because that was what he needed between deployments. When I’d gotten pregnant, his proposal had been more like a decision made out of duty to his religion, and he’d insinuated a quick courthouse ceremony was all I deserved for having sex with him outside of marriage.

  “You shouldn’t have followed me here.” That’s what he’d said inside that crate. Like I was the one always in the wrong, and he was always in the right.

  I’d been so wrapped up in the idea of a nuclear family, just like my mom’s and dad’s. But our relationship, our marriage—it had always been about what he wanted. I’d just been an accessory along for the ride. And now he’d brought me here for more of the same for the perceived crime of daring to move on without him. I fist my oven-mitted hand around the frying pan.

  Alberto isn’t dead, but he is a ghost. A ghost who has haunted me ever since that Christmas Eve and taken everything that mattered: my home in Hawaii, my peace of mind, the best relationship I’ve ever had.

  And now…he’s going to take my life if I don’t docilely do whatever he commands.

  “Maybe I should handcuff you to the bed after breakfast,” he suggests over the loaded gun. “See what all the fuss is about.”

  Impotent rage and bitter regret churn in my stomach. Albie will no longer have a mother and Rashid will never know how I felt. All because I stayed quiet, thinking that would keep us all safe. And now my disgusting supposed-to-be-dead husband is going to force me to have sex with him because he’s convinced himself that’s what I like. What I deserve….

  It feels like a million years since Jazz insisted that I deserved more than a life of exile from paradise.

  I want to cry, but without warning my inner drill sergeant suddenly comes back, her voice stronger and louder than ever. “No, Hayes, you will not go out sniveling and still dancing on that asshole’s strings!”

  She’s right, I realize. She’s damn right. I’m done being this ghost’s victim. A new plan starts to form in my mind, hard and resolute.

  “The tortilla’s done,” I say turning away from his lewd suggestion and clicking off the burner. “But I’m going to need both hands to flip it on to the plate.”

  I wait, hoping he falls for my bait. Alberto’s so old-school, I doubt it would even occur to him to offer to do any part o
f the cooking process himself.

  To my relief, he stands up and holsters the gun. But when he steps up to the stove, he eyes the frying pan suspiciously. “You have no idea how much trouble I got in after following you to Hawaii. My handler confiscated the phone I was using to text my brothers, and it took me months to get my hands on another burner without him seeing. But now, because of that bitch sister of yours, I can’t even keep in contact with my family. You’ve put me through a lot of trouble, whore….”

  He transfers his malevolent gaze from the cast iron cookware, back to me. “So if you even think about trying to hit me with that frying pan when I let you out of these cuffs, I will slit your throat and let you bleed out like the whore you are.”

  I don’t let him see the anger. Only the fear. I know that’s what he wants. Not the mutually-consented-to fantasy, like Rashid. He wants to control me and every word that comes out of my mouth, even if it means killing me and leaving Albie without a mother.

  “I won’t, I promise,” I answer him, making sure my voice shakes.

  And that’s a promise I keep. I don’t hit Alberto with the frying pan right when he lets me out of the cuffs. When he lets me out of the cuffs, I shove the hot metal spatula in his eye.

  “You fucking who—” he starts to scream.

  Then I hit him with the pan. See? Promise kept!

  He reels backward, and I take off running. With nothing but a frying pan between me and certain death.

  * * *

  “Come out, come out, wherever you whore!” Alberto singsongs in the distance.

  Despite only having read one piece of literature fanatically over and over again for his last few years in the witness protection program, Alberto’s apparently into the wordplay now.

  I don’t come out. Instead, I squeeze my eyes shut and hope I’m completely obscured by the thick trunk I hid behind when I heard the first shot whiz through the trees.